After a fairly intense six months, the small gang of Molecules had been given the green light from Sony to go into full production. Up until now the company had been formed entirely of Lionhead leavers and friends, but now there was a game to make, and some money to make it with, so Media Molecule started to grow.
They advertised, interviewed, hired, all whilst continuing to work on the game…
“It was a weird one, we’d hired key people, but we were all working on such independent things. We didn’t really work together, we discussed together, but there was so much to do that we just… well I could work on a 3D engine, but there was no hope of it integrating with Dave at that stage, Dave was working on a level editor… the PC editor was one of the first things that was made - post green light, we very much focussed on creative tools.”
“At this stage, the only creative tools were a paintbrush, a roller, a shotgun, a hairdryer, a sponge gun and a jet-pack. They were totally physical, so the way you shaped things was to subtract by blowing holes in things, take aim and fire. The sponge gun squirted foam that solidified, the paint roller allowed you to colour.”
“You think of painting and decorating as something cool, like how it is now it’s with Popit, but then it was physical, so you could only really decorate in a radius of about three Sackboys, otherwise you needed to get someone to pick you up and lift you up to paint up higher. You needed two player just to paint the out of reach bits.”
“The Greenlight was four players playing through what would become English Garden one and English Garden three, and then at the end there was this create bit - back then there was no distinction between create and play”
“So, [in the greenlight], you were meant to build this giant from pre-made sponge bits, but it took about 10 minutes of skilful three player co-op play to build! It’s painful to watch”
“When you pressed select to go into your inventory, you teleported to a different world and the inventory was entirely physical. It was terrible.”
“We’d built one level around Jack and the beanstalk, which is a great idea, but when you have a platform game with gravity pulling you down, building a vertical level is the hardest type of level because you’re constantly fighting gravity. So the game was really hard, until we realised that! And the create tools were just rubbish.”
“There was a real angsty moment where we decided to go unphysical, which was a big decision because we wanted desperately to stay physical, we wanted the create to be fun.”
“Create now is fun, maybe only for 10 minutes, but it’s quite easy to make a car or a ramp, as evidenced by ‘Ramp’, but there’s some joy in that and it’s quick and it’s easy, and the majority of our players could make something like ‘Ramp’.”
“So, we accepted our limitations.”
“Create mode didn’t exist for a long time, it was just ‘the game’ and in ‘the game’ you could build stuff and blow stuff up, but it was really hard to balance, so we had to split it up. It didn’t get taken out until right at the end, we had creative challenges in play mode, where there were special blocks that allowed you to use Popit when you were standing on them.”
“The blocks were made of pink glowy stuff, you got all the powers of create mode if you stood on one, but then we started adding rules, such as only being able to use raw materials you found in the game. At one point the resources were limited. Base materials became ‘resource’ - Sponge, Wood, Metal etc, and they were all accounted for.”
“Those point bubbles in Play mode were originally ‘resource’ - raw materials for you to collect, which you used later in the level to build say, a bridge, but the bridge needed a certain amount of resource. ”
“We kept that until like 2008, October” Alex jokes…
“OK not quite, but right near the end of development”
“As we went on, the game slowly morphed into having way more power for the creators, just a bit more abstract. Before it was more physical but with far less power.”
“If we hadn’t have done that, you’d never see the variety of levels that you see today, if you’d had to carve the Contra levels by using shotguns… well… there’s just no way, right?”
“I think instead of being wowed by things like that, we’d be looking at a basic platform level and saying things like ‘Holy crap! How did they make that perfect circle?’ ”
“I’m glad we did it, but it was painful to give up on that physical create idea.”